by David Nasaw
While the Hearst papers would recover quickly, Hearst himself would have a more difficult time undoing the damage that had been done to him personally. His newspapers’ attacks on McKinley had been intemperate and vicious, though no more so than those of other newspapers on other candidates, and probably much less so than the Republican papers' attacks on Bryan. What distinguished Hearst from his competitors was that his invective was better illustrated, better captioned, more pointed, and probably more effective.
In the aftermath of the McKinley assassination, Hearst absented himself from electoral politics, but remained active as publisher and editorial director of his newspapers in San Francisco, New York, and Chicago. With major daily and Sunday newspapers in the nation's most populous Eastern, Midwestern, and Western cities, he was already well on his way to establishing the nation’s most powerful publishing empire.
The Hearst papers in San Francisco, New York, and Chicago shared news items, features, and editorials each day, and they all included the American Humorist, Hearst’s color comic supplement, on Sundays. On moving to New York in 1895, Hearst had leased his own “wire” to move news, features, and editorials back and forth between the Journal and the San Francisco Examiner. In 1900, he added Chicago to this wire, laying the foundation for what would become his own wire service, the International News Service. In 1902, he added a second newspaper in Chicago, the morning Examiner, to supplement his evening American.38
All of this cost money, millions of dollars of it. Phoebe, reluctantly, lent her son the capital he needed, but kept careful track of every dollar. As her accountants and business advisers testified in a court hearing on her estate in 1921, while Phoebe believed that her son was entitled to half the senator’s estate, she felt obligated “to exercise restraint over him.” Instead of settling a sum of money on him, she lent him funds for business purposes. By 1902, she had loaned him a total of $8 million to purchase and upgrade his New York and Chicago papers. According to Hearst’s own testimony, she then canceled that loan: “She told me that she felt that I was morally entitled under the terms of my father’s will to half the estate, and she proposed to—with proper regulation on her part and decision as to amounts—let me have the necessary funds to establish my papers, but that she naturally wanted me to exercise more caution thereafter in the use of funds, and I did exercise more caution.”39
When that same year, 1902, the Philadelphia Record was put on sale, Hearst was interested, but backed out in the end, no doubt because Phoebe having just forgiven him $8 million of debt was not about to advance him any more money. Hearst’s major competitor for the Philadelphia paper was Adolph Ochs, the owner of the New York Times, who wrote to express his gratitude to Hearst for having abandoned Philadelphia: “I write to let you know that I am not unmindful of the significance of such a manifestation of good will....I hope that when you do make your appearance in Philadelphia, your presence there may not endanger my properties, but that the pleasant relationship that now exists between us in New York may extend to Philadelphia; that we may find Philadelphia as we find New York—large enough for both of us.”40
The two publishers were already, at this early date, entering into a sort of mutual admiration society. They had much in common. Both had bought failing New York papers, Hearst in 1895, Ochs the following year, and despite the predictions of almost everyone in the city, had turned them around. Ochs had had the more difficult time, but had succeeded in tripling circulation to 75,000 in 1898, when he lowered the price of his daily from three cents to a penny. Though his daily was still dwarfed—in advertising inches and circulation—by the Pulitzer and Hearst papers, which had combined evening and morning circulations in the vicinity of half a million, Ochs was unconcerned. Unlike Hearst and Pulitzer, he had no interest in securing a mass audience.
The Times did not entertain its readers. It did not illustrate its news stories or plot them as minimelodramas. Its columnists, reporters, and editorial writers were not known for their prose styles. It did not publish fiction or political cartoons or comics. Ochs’s self-proclaimed task as a newspaper publisher was to inform, not to entertain. As he announced when he bought the Times on August 19, 1896, his goal was to give “thoughtful, pure-minded people ... all the news, in concise and attractive form, in language that is parliamentary in good society” and to give that news “impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of any party, sect or interest involved.”
Though he claimed, as Hearst did, that his was a nonpartisan newspaper, it was every bit as committed to Republican party candidates, platforms, and principles as Hearst was to Democratic. The difference in their political coverage was one of style. Hearst took his political stands proudly—and loudly. He was an advocate, an enthusiast. Ochs was not. He devoted many more inches of space to Republican candidates than to the Democrats, but covered their campaigns in a flattened, distanced prose quite unlike the adulation the Hearst papers lavished on the Democratic candidates they boosted in their news and editorial pages.41
Because Hearst and Ochs published very different papers for very different audiences, they did not compete with one another and would remain on good terms until Hearst entered politics.
Hearst returned to active politicking in the fall of 1902. He had, he wrote his mother, been approached by “a faction of the Democratic party usually very powerful [which] has asked me to allow them to present my name for Governor. They say I will be nominated. I don't think I will be. Still it is an alluring proposition because if a Democrat is by chance elected Governor of New York he stands the best chance of being the Democratic nominee for president in 1904. It would be ridiculous for me to consider such a possibility if there were any really big men in the field but there are not any.”42
While the idea of running for governor in 1902 certainly appealed to Hearst, the party leaders never seriously considered his candidacy. He was too young, too inexperienced, too identified with Bryan, and too much a radical to be nominated for state office. He was, on the other hand, too rich and powerful to be ignored entirely. To demonstrate in advance the Democratic party’s gratitude for Hearst’s financial and editorial support in the upcoming campaign, he was given the nomination for the congressional seat from the Eleventh District left vacant by the death of the incumbent, Amos J. Cummings, coincidentally a former journalist.43
Hearst’s nomination was greeted with little buzz in the New York dailies, even his own. Only the weekly gossip sheets paid much attention to the notion that the boy publisher and man-about-town might soon be campaigning for public office. The New-Yorker, which billed itself as “A Journal Mainly About Interesting People,” found the prospect immensely amusing:
I understand that the Sassafras Sisters [Millicent and Anita Willson] are to join with their patron and protector, W. R. Hearst, in a personally-conducted campaign for Congress....In serio-chronic roles they achieved immortal glory and annexed themselves to the Hearst leg—no, to the Hearst millions—and they are proposing to make partial payment of their debt of gratitude by hop, skip, and jumping through the district which is to be disgraced in Congress by the yellow degenerate. Old man Sassafras, who in his day did stunts as an “eccentric dancer,” is expected to renew his youth during the next month and contort for the advancement of the political ambitions of his brevet son-in-law.... With the aid of the Sassafras family the debauchee of journalism expects to be rag-timed into Congress ... To spindling “Billy” the pain of it will be that he cannot secure a certificate entitling the Sassafras Sisters to seats by his side during the session of Congress. Flanked by the ravishing demoiselles he could do great execution among the statesmen.... One of his former most intimate friends and associates, by the way, tells me that the political bee is buzzing very loud in the Hearst bonnet. He has made up his egotistical young mind that sooner or later he is going to be the first Socialist President of the United States.44
Befitting his new role as candidate—and no doubt to counter adverse publicity like that in
the New-Yorker —Hearst remade himself from top to bottom. Years before, his mother’s friend Clara Anthony had predicted that he would not succeed until he had broken from the “trammels and traditions of his present life....Ifa blast of dynamite could extirpate most of his present advisers and he be allowed to be himself, he would develop as God meant he should. I hope I’m not barbarous but I would like to see Jack Follansbee for one break his ugly neck, and every other fawning sycophant that exploits Will follow suit.”45
While Will was not willing to follow this course to the letter, he was now convinced that he had to do something to make it appear as if he were no longer the spindling Billy the New-Yorker took such delight in ridiculing. He shaved off his mustache and replaced his loud collegiate ties and checked suits with a long, black frock coat and broad-brimmed soft black hat. The frock coat gave him the appearance of physical weight and spiritual gravitas. Cloaked in black, with ghostly pallor and a cold, hard stare, he resembled a modern-day grim reaper.
Though with Tammany’s backing his election was guaranteed, Hearst campaigned vigorously. According to the New-Yorker, which gave his campaign front-page coverage as if there were no other that November:
The Yellow Fellow has knocked the hoops off his money barrels and is spending it like water. His campaign for Congress in the Eleventh District is a record-breaker in that respect ... He is housing droves of labor skates from Chicago, sand-lotters from San Francisco and spellbinders from other camps at the Hoffman House and supplying them with richest food and viands. I do not know where he has his imported musicians staked out, but they, too, are living on the fat of the land. He has billed his district like a circus and established headquarters galore. Every man and thing in the district that money can hire or buy is on his pay-rolls or his deeds in his strong box.46
The capstone of the campaign was a rally at Madison Square Garden on October 27 that the New York Times labeled “the most important meeting” of the campaign. Hearst reportedly spent $10,000 alone on the premeeting fireworks display that began at dusk in Madison Square Park. The dust and smoke from the fireworks display was so great that, according to the New York Sun, “many a dinner at the hotels around the Square” was irretrievably “spoiled.” Following the fireworks came a full-throttle outdoor band concert which must have disturbed the diners yet again. At 7:30, the doors to the Garden were thrown open to the 10,000 Democrats who had secured free tickets to the rally. The arena had, the Times reported, never been “more brilliantly decorated ... From every available pillar, post, and balcony were strung out the red, white, and blue in reckless profusion, while from the girders were hung hundreds upon hundreds of American flags.” Not content with traditional campaign paraphernalia, Hearst arranged for a special electrical sign behind the speaker’s stand which spelled out in electric bulbs: “Congress Must Control the Trusts.” The rally continued in high gear until the candidate took the podium. As the Sun reported rather kindly the following morning, “Hearst’s voice is that of the ordinary man in daily conversation. In the Garden the strongest voices find it hard to satisfy all parts of the house.... Mr. Hearst had not gone far when the deepest bass [in the rear in the audience] cried: ‘Give it to ’em, Billy. I only wish you had my voice.’” Fortunately, Hearst’s speech was a brief one. He was followed to the podium by Eugene Schmitz, the orchestra leader who had been elected mayor of San Francisco, former governor James Budd of California, former vice president Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, Senator Charles Culberson from Texas, Senator Edward Carmack of Tennessee, chairman of the Democratic National Committee James Jones, and several labor leaders, a rather impressive assortment of speakers for a Congressional candidate running virtually without opposition.47
Though Hearst had accepted Tammany’s nomination and imported a phalanx of Democratic stars to appear beside him in Madison Square Garden, he had no intention of playing by the established rules of political partisanship. William Randolph Hearst—as a candidate for office, he had begun using his middle name—was bigger than the Democratic party. On November 3, the day before Election Day, the Evening Journal called for a Democratic victory but quite pointedly declared that “the political struggle this year is not a struggle between two American political parties. It is a conflict between the trusts and the people.”48
Hearst was not simply the candidate of the Democratic party, but the self-proclaimed candidate and champion of the working and immigrant peoples of New York and the nation. He published a German-language newspaper, supported Irish independence, and sympathetically reported on events of interest to the Russian-Jewish communities. And he would continue, as publisher and politician, to reach out to these communities. In 1903, in a stroke of journalistic brilliance, he dispatched Irish nationalist Michael Davitt to report on the massacre of the Jews in Kishinev, Russia. Two years later, his newspapers featured an on-the-scene account by Maxim Gorky of the Red Sunday massacre in St. Petersburg in 1905, and helped raise funds to aid victims of the pogroms.49
Hearst was elected to Congress in November of 1902 by more than 15,000 votes, which his papers proclaimed was the largest plurality ever recorded in the Eleventh District. Two days later, he issued his first manifesto. Lecturing Democratic party leaders from his editorial-page throne, he declared that the Democratic party would, in future, only be “victorious,” as he had been in the Eleventh District, by associating “itself intimately and sincerely with the working people of this country...[and] embody[ing] in itself the fundamental ideas that give power to the unions, that give justice and victory to union efforts ... The man who does not indorse [the demands of labor for shorter hours and better pay] has no right to call himself a Democrat, he has no place in the Democratic party.”50
The message was the same one he had been articulating since his nomination. He had graciously accepted Tammany’s nomination, but he was not going to Washington to follow orders or be a “team player.” Bryan’s second defeat had left the party with a leadership vacuum which Hearst intended to fill.
His moment of triumph lasted only that long. To celebrate his victory, he held a huge fireworks display in Madison Square, as he had done so often before. This time, something went wrong. “As the election excitement was at its height in Madison Square shortly before 10 o’clock,” the New York Times reported the next morning, “a terrific explosion of fireworks occurred, transforming in an instant the entire east side of the park into a scene of death and carnage which a battlefield could scarcely have surpassed in its horror.... The solid ground shook as with an earthquake, and then for a large space there was nothing to be seen save mangled forms of women and children and some men lying dead and distorted or creeping away to the outskirts of the bloody plain, while the air was rent with the shrieks of the wounded and dying and the crash of falling wood, glass, and iron from wrecked buildings.”51
A dozen spectators were killed at once, scores of others injured. Hearst’s victory celebration had been transformed in an instant into a scene of unimagined horror. Though he had not lit the fuse, he was held responsible for the pain, the wounds, the deaths. The district attorney quickly, perhaps too quickly, absolved Hearst of legal culpability, but the case did not fade away, in large part because it highlighted one of the persistent slurs on Hearst’s character: that he refused to take responsibility for his actions. Immediately after the fireworks accident, Hearst departed for an extended trip to California to visit his mother, his grandmother, and the Examiner. He left his attorneys behind to sort out his mess.
While back in New York his newspapers celebrated his electoral triumph and hinted at higher offices to come, Will attended to personal matters on the West Coast. He had decided to marry Millicent Willson, who was now twenty-one, and he wanted to explain his decision to his grandparents, whom he expected to be supportive, and his mother, who he knew would not be. According to Phoebe’s niece and Will’s cousin, Anne Apperson Flint, Phoebe was so “terribly upset” at her son’s decision to marry the chorus-girl daughter of a B
rooklyn hoofer that she took to her bed. Though she tried her best to talk Will out of the marriage, she recognized early that she was fighting a losing battle. Her boy was forty years old now and a congressman, and she had no allies—George having died and Orrin Peck having already accepted Will’s invitation to be his best man.
Despite Phoebe’s fears that her boy was marrying beneath his class, Millicent Willson was, in fact, the perfect companion for him. She was a stunning-looking woman, rather tall, with unblemished pale skin, dark hair, and piercingly dark eyes. She was also devoted to Hearst and having been with him for five years now, knew him as well as anyone else.52
The conventional wisdom, enshrined in dozens of articles and several biographies, is that Will Hearst married in 1903 for propriety’s sake, that, having embarked on a political career, he needed to put an end to the rumors about his private life. Unfortunately, instead of putting rumors about his personal life to rest, his marriage to a Brooklyn chorus girl with whom he had been consorting for several years provoked more whispering about his morals—or the lack of them. “Mr. ‘Billy’ Hearst’s marriage has been pretty much discussed the past week,” the New-Yorker commented the week of the wedding, “and the general opinion seems to be, among men at least, that it has very effectually put a stopper upon his political aspirations ... The ‘first lady in the land’ must, even in the eyes of the proletariat, be fashioned of other material than that which goes to the formation of a ‘Sassafras Sister.’” The item concluded its political epitaph for Hearst by stating that should he ever run for president, it “would take only about three weeks for the cold facts to be brought by the opposition managers to the consciousness of every voter in the country. Mr. Hearst has signed his political death warrant.”53